Racism, Immigration, and Health's Effect on Psychological Development

Evaluate the socio-political factors that are racism immigration and health. In your evaluation of these factors, describe their potential impact on the psychological development, distress, and behavior on a culturally diverse individual. .

Solution Preview

With socio-political factors, relating to, or involving a combination of social and political issues, the potential is there to impact the psychological development, distress, and behavior on a culturally diverse individual. To understand what these impacts are, one would first have to have a clear definition of social, political, culture, and the unbiased views of the issues. Social is the interaction between individuals and groups within the same society; forming cooperative and interdependent relationships with others of similar make-up. Political refers to the government, and the interaction and relationship one has with the system. Culture, on the other hand, is the shared beliefs and backgrounds of a collection of people. Day-to-day there are a number of issues that could impact a person's development, cause distress, and guide behaviors. An attempt is made looking at how healthcare, immigration, and prejudice issues have an impact on an individual's social and political views developmentally and behaviorally.

Healthcare

Human development is defined as “change during the life course in enduring patterns of behavior or perception resulting from the interplay of biological characteristics of the person and the environment” (Bronfenbrenner, 1983). Cognition is the processing of the brain. Cognitive components of human development first start at birth; the framework of what we are to become. These are the attributes that we get from our parents in our DNA. As we grow we go through developmental stages in life; how fast and productive is dependant on out cognitive ability. Both Freud and Piaget have humans going through stages of development (Carducci, 2002). Damage to a person’s cognition either while invetro or through growth, could have an impact on the success of each developmental stage. Cognitive development is the construction of thought processes, including remembering, problem solving, and decision-making, from childhood through adolescence to adulthood.

A social component is any condition outside the person that affects of is affected by the development. Development takes place through increasingly complex processes in which an active organism interacts with persons, objects, and symbols in its immediate environment (Bronfenbrenner, 1998). The biopsychosocial model is the biological (how a person was born), psychological (how a person thinks), social (how a person lives) impacts on the human being. It looks at all influences on a person's psyche. The biomedical model looks strictly at the biological (DNA) make-up of a person to explain who and how they are. Through interactions with our environment add to our cognitive framework to shape our personality. Change in the environment could have change in development, for good or bad.

Immigration

Immigration can be viewed, for the sake of this paper, in two ways. One is those people introduced to a new country; and the other is those receiving a large immigration population (such as the United States). The acceptance of the new environment and population influences the political and social views of the society; as well as how gentle the immigrated assimilate into the new habitat. Research areas have been examined, according to different ...

Solution Summary

The solution looks at each of these socio-cultural factors to psychological development separately and draws conclusions on their overall impact using established studies in an essay-style response of 1980 words with many references.